A review by cheries35plus
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

3.0

A soap opera from the early 1800s. Tons of unhappy marriages and unlucky at love. Full of gossip and manipulative, self-righteous people seeking social status. High social status cannot be obtained unless you have tons of money. If you are poor, you are a social leper, despite whether you are moral and have a good heart. Wealth enables parents to bend their children to their ways or face being disowned or cut out of the will. This started out well and quite funny, telling us the contrasting personalities of Amelia and Rebecca. One saintly, the other selfish and manipulative. The middle of the story really lagged and got long winded. I started this as an audio book, but several chapters in, I started getting confused, so I swapped over to an ebook. Honestly, there were parts that went over my head, even while using my Kindle dictionary and Kindle translator for the French. The writer swapped titles of characters and swapped pronouns from one paragraph to the next, so it got confusing on who the author was meaning. Plus, there were times one sentence may be eight to twelve lines long. There were a lot of Crawley family members that I got confused on who they were. I can not remember struggling to understand a classic the way I struggled with this one. Thankfully, the end of the story picked back up to regain my interest. I bet this was a better read when at the time it was published as a weekly installments. I bet this was a big hit in it's day and some readers were probably shocked by it's soap opera storyline.